A recent paper by Farrell, Lawrence, and Sides found that more blog readers self-identified as liberal, rather than conservative. In a bloggingheads diavlog and post at CT, Farrell also argues that democrats have dominated the Internet early, since blogging took off when the Republicans held the presidency and Congress. The internet may also appeal to younger people who tend to be more liberal than older people.
This poses real problems for the Republican party. Will they be able to catch up? Republicans took early domination of talk radio and the left was never able catch up in that medium. They now face the same difficult catch-up position in the Internet, that Democrats faced in talk radio in the 1980s.
I’m not entirely sure that liberals control the Internet. In a paper that I did with my colleague, Toni Pole, we found that more bloggers in our study identified as conservative or libertarian. A quick look at the top 100 bloggers shows a healthy balance between the left and the right (though I have to admit being too lazy to count them up.) Outside of the blogosphere, Democrats have been much better about using all
tools of new media – YouTube and social networking software, but within
the blogosphere, many of the early adopters were conservative who were
all steamed up about 9/11 (ie Instapundit, Hugh Hewitt, Lileks, Sullivan). Perhaps the huge success of Huffington Post, a late adopter, is helping to skew readership to the left.
I do think that liberal bloggers have an entirely different mission than conservative bloggers. Liberal bloggers, taking the lead from guys like Kos, are more interested in political mobilization, while conservative bloggers have been more interested in attacking the media and academia, which they perceive as preservers of the liberal order. (Our paper hints at that finding, but we needed a larger N to prove that point.) The mission of liberal bloggers may be more successful and more attractive to future blog readers.
Apt. 11d 
I suspect that conservatives will never catch up in the blogosphere, just as liberals have never caught up in talk radio.
I have often wondered who listens to Rush Limbaugh. I know his ratings are huge, but who can listen to the radio in the middle of the workday? Well, people who do shift work, for one. Or people who can listen to the radio while they work, like truck drivers. But it’s not something you can do in an office or a classroom.
And who reads blogs? Mostly, it’s people who spend a lot of time with their computers, especially those of us who spend the entire workday sitting at a desk facing a monitor.
QED.
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I’ve noticed that blog traffic is very heavy during working hours and fades out promptly at the end of the day. No offense to the innocent or the flexibly employed, but some folks appear to be ripping off vast amounts of their employers’ time and computer resources.
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New guy’s getting the tour of corporate headquarters, big shiny skyscraper, lots of bustle, etc.
“So how many people work in these offices?”
“About half of them.”
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I know 9/11 is what started me reading conservative blogs. At the time, it seemed to me that someone whose only knowledge of history came from the NYT would think that the Crusades were the only contact between the West and Islam until 1918. It also seemed to me that the media was running lots not particularly relevant fluff stories about Islam (algebra was invented by Arabs, Islam has great religious freedom by 13th century standards, the Arabs saved Aristotle and invented bathing with soap, and the vast majority of Muslims would gladly pull little Timmy from the well, etc.).
In sum, I saw much of the reporting out there as a deliberate attempt to calm down the hot-heads. This pissed me off and drove me to seek other news sources and permanently altered my reading habits. Obviously, I still read from left-of-center blogs, but it was 2004 or so before I resumed reading the Sunday NYT on a regular basis. Before 9/11, I read the NYT daily and I could finish the Thursday puzzle like 75% of the time (my rule was I could use Google once and still say I did it).
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Speaking of the NYT, I got a letter from them today (in benighted TX, and never having been a subscriber) asking me to pay $6.70 a week (that’s 50% off, they say, and you get PREMIUM bonus crosswords!) for 8 weeks to get the paper on weekdays and Sunday. Wow, that’s only $348 a year. Meanwhile, I have subscritions to Coastal Living, Cottage Living, and Dwell with all their spectacular photography for probably $2 an issue, and all the print content I want on the internet for free. How do the folks at the NYT think this is going to end well for them?
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Continuing the diversion, the Democratic primary coverage turned me off the Times — we were daily subscribers who ended up canceling. Even now, as someone who will probably vote for Obama, I’m astonished by how biased the coverage is. I can only imagine how McCain supporters must feel. The most recent example was a howler of a story which, after detailing the lack of financial disclosure by both campaigns, including how Obama hadn’t updated his list of bundlers since November, said that transparency was “one of the cornerstones of the Obama campaign.”
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I didn’t mean to focus on the NYT for any reason other than it was where I used to get most of my news. The most unusual news story I ever saw was on the BBC right after the (second) invasion of Iraq. They had a panel exploring President Bush’s religion as if it were strange, foreign, and Texan. I kept shouting at the screen “He’s a Methodist. It was started in Britain. His parents were Episcopalian, another denomination started in Britain.”
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Very funny, MH. Speaking of Brits struggling to understand Americans, I got a copy of the Economist to while away the flights back to Texas a few days ago. I realize the Economist deserves some credit for attention it casts on neglected areas of the globe, but I was really put off by the know-it-all tone–the Economist knows what’s best for every country around the globe, by George. I wish I had the issue on me and I can’t remember all the relevant details, but there was a story on the US that was really annoying. Just as with your BBC piece, there was the same struggle to understand the odd folkways of exotic (!!!)foreigners, while recycling stale cliches. If I have time, I’ll try to dig up a quote or two. It’s really weird, since I don’t think there’s an educated American alive who regards the British as exotic and inscrutable.
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